Time it was

by Christopher Amenta

A chance meeting in a diner yields a firsthand account of World War II on the Heights

Woodward and Elliott, in the Elliotts’ home on September 29. Image: Frank Curran

Kathleen Woodward ’83, JD’88, was at her neighborhood diner on Saturday, September 8, around noontime, a bit later than usual. It was the day of the Boston College–Holy Cross football game, and she brought up the topic with a gentleman wearing a maroon and gold cap. As a freshman in 1944, he’d played in a game against Holy Cross, he told her, two days before entering the Navy. She later learned his name: Joseph Elliott. He had returned to Boston College to complete an accelerated undergraduate education and earned his law degree in 1951. Woodward wanted to hear more about the war years on Chestnut Hill, and she thought readers of BCM would too. Three weeks later, she, Elliott, his wife, Betty, and a BCM reporter sat in the Elliotts’ dining room in a western suburb of Boston. They’d deemed the diner too noisy for this conversation.

Joseph Elliott of Belmont, Massachusetts, entered Boston College in 1944 at the age of 17. Almost two years earlier, the Heights student newspaper had dubbed the Class of 1942 the University’s first “war class.” By May of 1942, five months after Pearl Harbor, many members had been called to active duty, “resulting in the absence of many familiar faces at graduation,” the paper reported. When Elliott arrived at Boston College, some veterans were already returning to campus.

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At 17, Elliott felt in awe of those men. “The people who’d actually been in the service and were back at BC, they were an inspiration,” he said. “They didn’t talk much about it. They were very much older.”

Like many undergraduates in those days, Elliott commuted from his parent’s house every morning with “two or three guys” from the neighborhood. Campus, Elliott said, seemed quiet then, sometimes even “somber.” Enrollment was around 300 (down from the 1,700 it had been in the fall of 1942); the more-than-decimated senior class numbered 33, according to the yearbook Sub Turri.

“I was making new friends, but you’ve got to understand that there just weren’t that many people to see in those days,” he said. “An awful lot of guys were in the service.”

Elliott had been a three-sport athlete at Belmont High School—football, basketball, and baseball—but he did not consider himself talented enough to play in college. “I don’t think I ever thought much about having the opportunity,” he said. “And if it hadn’t been for World War II, maybe I never would have.”

With a generation of young men overseas, he was scouted in an unexpected way. “A priest in my area put my name into consideration at BC,” he said. “When I went to see them over there, they offered me a scholarship.”

Boston College, like many universities and colleges during the war, was operating on a speeded-up schedule, admitting freshmen in waves, in June, September, and sometimes in February. Elliott enrolled a week after his high school graduation and joined a football team that had been ranked eighth in the country two years earlier. Even wartime college football “was a helluva difference” from high school, he said. “The war sopped up some talent but not all of it.”

That fall the Heights covered school dances and Boston theater, public affairs, campus clubs, and sports. And the same November 3 issue that trumpeted Elliott’s two touchdown runs against Syracuse University also printed a front-page update of the “Gold Star Casualty Toll” of graduates and former students. At time of press, 70 had died. Another 17 were declared missing. “Boston College has more than 4,550 of her sons in the armed forces, . . . students who once walked a college campus, carefree and happy, who greeted each other every day in the cafeteria, the library and in the classrooms,” the Heights wrote.

“Everybody knew who was eligible for the draft,” Elliott said of the campus that year. “It was no secret and no surprise when you got it.”

His own draft notice came mid-semester. He enlisted instead in the Navy, then applied for and received a deferment that enabled him to finish the football season. He ran tailback for the Eagles in seven games. He scored nine touchdowns, including two in the finale against the College of the Holy Cross on November 26 at Fenway Park, before a crowd of 30,000. “I played against the Cross on a Sunday afternoon, and I was in the Navy up in Romulus, New York, on Tuesday morning.”

Elliott, in winter 1945: “I played against the Cross on a Sunday afternoon and I was in the Navy . . . on Tuesday morning.” Image: Courtesy of J. Joseph Elliott.

Timing spared Elliott from combat, with the Japanese surrender announced in August. He trained, then spent nearly two years in the service in Florida and Texas, performing what he described as “routine office work.” In 1947, Elliott returned to Boston College on the G.I. Bill to find the campus transformed. Enrollment reached an all-time record that year—at 2,811—and Elliott had to try out for the squad he’d led two seasons ago. “They had a good team that year,” Elliott said. “A lot of talent.” He didn’t make the cut.

Elliott pivoted. “I’d never had great marks,” he said, but he turned his attention to academics. “At least I knew I could get an education, so I chucked the football and became a student.”

He was part of a class that went straight to law school after two years of undergraduate work—a way to expedite the careers of individuals who’d lost time to the war. He made Dean’s List, passed the Massachusetts bar exam, and spent 35 years working for New England Telephone before retiring.

In 1944, Belmont High School’s yearbook, the Blue Print, now archived online, contained a photo of each graduate alongside a list of accomplishments, a quote, a reported pet peeve, and an ambition. The latter, for Elliott, comprised two words: Boston College.

“You know something, I surprised myself,” he said, recalling the student he became.